Black Mexico: Nineteenth-Century Discourses of Race and Nation (original) (raw)
Third World Quarterly, 2021
The Mexican government is currently attempting to incorporate Black Mexicans into the national cultural landscape. However, the centring of whiteness through mestizaje limits the possibilities of Black inclusion by continuing to imagine the archetypal Mexican citizen as non-Black. Therefore, a colonial inheritance of racial value continues to frame how blackness can be constituted as part of the contemporary nation. This article argues that while the War for Independence may have allowed for the imagination of a new 'Mexican' , a colonial racial economy continues to endure. This racial economy continues to limit the possibility of citizenship for African descendants in México.
Transnational Immigration Politics in Mexico, 1850-1920
2013
This academic adventure began for me in 1996, and along this long journey I have received tremendous support from many people, who encouraged me to not give up on my goal of earning a doctorate degree in history; despite coming across faculty that tried to dissuade me from going to graduate school, remarking that it would be too expensive and not worth it. Nonetheless, putting that negativity aside, from the University of California, San Diego, I thank Eric Van Young for believing in me and encouraging me not to listen to people who doubted my potential. At San Diego State University, the many letters of recommendation given to me by Paula De Vos and Elizabeth Colwill allowed me to continue to pursue a Ph.D. At the University of Arizona, I have to begin by first thanking my doctoral committee, Kevin Gosner and Martha Few for not only having to read a 260 page first draft version of this dissertation, but my advisor William H. Beezley, for promptly giving me back valuable feedback and suggestions throughout the summer to make the manuscript even better. During my graduate school experience at Arizona, I learned to have a more open mind and to not hesitate to share my ideas. Prior to going to Tucson, I had read an article in U.S. News and World Report's annual report on the best graduate schools in America, and it cautioned incoming graduate students not to openly discuss their research ideas, as dissertation topics had been known to be "stolen." Thus, while in my first research seminar at the university, which happened to be with professor Gosner in the fall of 2006, I explained my research topic to my classmate, Stephen Neufeld, and as a result, only a couple of days later, he informed me that he had come across a U.S. Congressional hearing on a black colonization scheme in Mexico from 1895, saying
Chasing Blackness: Re-investing value and Mexico's changing racial economy
2013
This dissertation explores how race is mobilized by "those on the bottom" within the confines of the current multicultural political arena dictated by the Mexican state as a means of access to national citizenship(s). This work adds an explicit cultural, social, and political element to the notion of "racial economy". I argue that race, ethnicity, and culture have an historic value that helps to define their current value within the neo-liberal multicultural state and can therefore be traded in a limited number of ways. In this way, the logic of difference, based on colonial logics of race and ethnicity, dictates particular potentials and perspectives on the use and value of race and ethnicity as a cultural, social, and political commodity. These colonial logics continue to inform state sanctioned strategies for the official recognition of difference within the Mexican nation state. However, this dissertation argues that these logics are explicitly challenged by grass root approaches to recognition and representation as witnessed by local activism and the tensions between state officials and community organizers over the means of production for selfrepresentation. A phenomenon that I refer to as "implication", suggests that invocations of particular histories and social phenomena, such as racism, implicate particular racial/ethnic groups in the deliberate construction of the racial past and present, and therefore can define government approaches to citizenship as the government only half-heartedly embraces the true historical treatment of its marginalized populations. The issue of choosing a social identity, then, is paramount, as all racial terms embody particular social histories and can act as mnemonic devices that trigger a number of accepted or contested social histories. For this reason, it is also argued that the tensions between government, academics, and activists over linguistic and symbolic representations of race are more than tiffs over politically correct nomenclature, and should be read as serious conflicts over social/historical representation and the power to selfiii identify. Lastly, I focus on the role that conflicting "racial economies" at the U.S./Mexico border have on processes of racial formation/transformation. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS
Hemispheric and Transborder Perspectives: Racialization of Mexicans through Time
Konturen
This article embeds a discussion of contemporary transborder communities—communities spread out in multiple locations in the U.S. and Mexico—in the history of U.S.-Mexico relations as seen through the colonial and contemporary mapping of space, place, people, race, and ethnicity both visually through the creation of maps and then metaphorically through U.S. immigration policy in the 19th and 20th centuries. I argue that the concept of “transborder” which can include borders of coloniality, ethnicity, race, nation, and region can help us to illuminate U.S.-Mexico relationships through time and the complexities of the racialization of Mexicans in the U.S.
Mexican Nationalisms, Southern Racisms: Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the U.S. South, 1908–1939
American Quarterly, 2008
The early twentieth century brought transformative Mexican migrations to places from Texas to Alaska, Michigan to California, and the South was no exception. Examining the case of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the South from 1908 to 1939, this essay shows how international migration, in this case between the United States and Mexico, has shaped the racial ideologies of nations and societies at both ends of migration streams. It traces the arrival of Mexican immigrants to two Southern locations, New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta, and discusses their initial experiences of race and class there. It then focuses on the middle- and upper-class community surrounding Mexico’s New Orleans consulate, as well as the self-appointed leadership among poor Mexican sharecroppers in Gunnison, Mississippi, to illuminate the distinctly Mexican strategies which Mexicans of all social classes pursued in their quest to attain and retain white status in the U.S. South. In the early twentieth century U.S. South, there were no Mexican Americans who could call upon U.S. citizenship or claims to be “Caucasian” under the law, nor organizers drawing Mexicans into class-based politics. There, Mexicans’ sole cultural and political claims took the form of Mexico-directed activism, through which the racial ideologies of both immigrants and Mexican government bureaucrats had a discernible impact upon the color line’s shape and foundations. Conversely, it was in the South that Mexican government representatives most directly confronted the black-white eugenic binary of U.S. white supremacy, and did so without the support of U.S.-based institutions or groups. This article argues that during the decade following the Mexican revolution, Mexican immigrants and bureaucrats in the South emphasized Mexico’s pre-revolutionary tradition of cultural whitening, avoiding the official post-revolutionary celebration of race-mixing, or mestizaje. In so doing, they successfully elided questions of eugenic race in their negotiation of the color line. They eventually secured Mexicans’ acceptance as white, a trajectory more closely mirroring national trends for European, rather than Mexican immigrants in the same period.
2000
The goal of this anthology, consisting of ten essays on the history of the Nuevomexicano experience from the short Mexican period to the post-Chicano movement era of the 1960s and 1970s, is to present a Chicano perspective on the Nuevomexicano historical experience. Divided into two parts, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the collection\u27s essays deal primarily with twentieth-century themes, a reasonable approach given the brevity of the Mexican era and the much longer period after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which initiated the era of United States rule. The dominant theme affirms that Nuevomexicanos have always contested their rights to equal citizenship in New Mexico, sometimes faring well, at others suffering the burden of being a racial or ethnic minority. Amidst this cultural conflict, much adaptation has characterized Nuevomexicano society in its interaction with the dominant forces since the coming of Anglo Americans
Decolonizing Intimacies: Women of Mexican Descent and Colorism
This essay explores colorism, or the ranking of individuals based on skin color or racialized phenotype, with a focus on women of Mexican descent. I offer a history of skin color consciousness, linking it to Spanish and Anglo American colonial beliefs about the value of women as reproductive objects and to contemporary articulations of lived experiences with colorism. First, I trace colorism historically, considering how discourses of difference built on sixteenth-century notions of gendered contamination and nineteenth-century notions of purity and prestige were used to construct and privilege whiteness. Next, I draw from interviews with four women who self-identify as Mexican-descent to document how personal experiences with colorism are remembered and understood. These narratives reveal the importance of the family as an institution within which a collective memory of historical white supremacy is continuously performed through colorism. The recognition that colorism is both reproduced and resisted through intimate familial relations opens a space to ask questions about the relationships between contemporary experience and histories of colonization and suggests, finally, that the family is a critical site for decolonial healing.
RACE AND ETHNIC RELATIONS IN MEXICO (Vigil and Lopez 2004)
Journal of Latino-Latin American Studies, 2004
Recent research is beginning to reexamine the conventional wisdom in Mexico that a "mestizocracia" reflects the nation's racial and cultural heritage, and not the separation that exists between urban "European-appearing" elites and Indians or darker mestizos from a low income background. Challenging the common belief that race problems and racism were solved over a hundred years ago in the aftermath of the colonial era, this paper explores some of the key issues in the debate and shows that there are still many entrenched racist attitudes and practices that persist from that time period, affecting both Mexicans in Mexico and the United States. The creation and promotion of a mestizo ideology by government officials is offset by the recent surge of racial pride and ethnic nationalism among Indians, particularly in light of the Zapatista movement. National "identity" politics include psychological elements and intra-group racism denoting the striving for a positive self-image.
Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States
2016
Indian Given is a timely book, coming to publication amidst calls for a wall along the US-Mexico border. This wall would seek to separate two distinct racial landscapes by protecting the whiteness of one from the "drugs, crime and rapists" bred and brought over by the mixed-race other. This racist geographical imagination in the United States has a long history of critical examination, but the racial imaginary of Latin American mestizaje is less familiar territory for many anglophone readers. Mar ıa Josefina Saldaña-Portillo's important contribution has been to write a monograph that eschews simplistic comparison by reading both countries' racial geographies with and through each other. Her central argument is that for five centuries, such racial geographies in -and across-the United States and Mexico have been "graphed around the troublesome trace of the Indian" (p. 22). Using insights from Geography to engage debates in Chicana/o and American Studies, and colonial, Mexican and US History, Saldaña-Portillo sets out to weave a palimpsestic account of shifting and mutually imbricated racial geographies. These range from the 1550 Valladolid debate over the rationality of the indigenous peoples of New Spain, to Jack Kerouac's romanticization of Mexico in On the Road, to the contemporary trillion-dollar drug war pursued by the US against Mexican narcos. Since Spanish and British colonization of the Americas, indigenous people have been seen by colonial and then settler states and cultures "in and as" landscape (p. 8). But as the demands of producing national space changed, they were not simply seen as eternal "Indians" and "indios." "[T]here were multiple generic 'Indians' and 'indios' deployed over time, with these generic concepts morphing as required by the acquisition of space by Spanish and Anglo-American colonialism, especially during moments of colonial or national crisis" (p. 8). The book offers readings of signal moments in the ongoing production of racial geographies over five main chapters in roughly chronological order. Chapter 1 concerns the 1550 Valladolid Debate and the 1763 Proclamation Line. These events in the histories of the Spanish and British Empires in the Americas helped define different relations between Indians and property-that is, the possibilities of Indians possessed as property vs. Indians' possession of property. Saldaña-Portillo's reading of the archive seeks to move beyond the labor-vs.land dichotomy in colonial historiography to show how this was itself an effect of the ways colonizers "visualized and produced the absence/presence of actual
The Issue of Blackness and Mestizaje in Two Distinct Mexican Contexts: Veracruz and Costa Chica
2014
The construction of new nations in Latin America has triggered debate on the definition of national identity with a view to reconciling the reality of mestizaje with the attribution, inherited from Colonial times, of specific „characteristics‟ to groups and individuals („Spanish‟, „Indian‟, „Black‟, „mulatto‟, etc). It was also confronted with racist connotations which, in the early 19th century, included the ideas of progress and modernity, hence the difficulty in legitimizing its own „brand of mestizaje.‟ We will address these issues through empirical examination of two contexts in Mexico: the State and City of Veracruz, and Costa Chica on the Pacific coast of the States of Oaxaca and Guerrero. What these two case studies share is the issue of mestizaje, so strongly associated with that of Mexican national identity, from the standpoint of the African presence which, though considerable from the start of colonization, was not included in „classic‟ views of national mestizaje. This analysis helps reveal various ways in which populations of African origin were incorporated into the Nation. Thus, we can see how the local configuration articulates with the overall discourse to privilege one facet or dimension of (cultural, or social, or political) Afro identification over another.